Hi all! It's been another few months, but I wanted to pop in and address a rather serious matter, since I'm sure it's not just isolated to me. My story Severed and Sewn was recently nominated at the Fuffy Fan Awards, which is awesome. Less awesome is that the link to the story did not redirect back to my Livejournal, but to a Fuffy archive called Oralfxatn. Not only was my name mistyped, but I was never contacted by either the site owner or site webmaster asking if I gave permission to have my work archived there.

While I do prefer to have my work read at my Livejournal, I have consented to a few fictions being posted at personal or pairing specific archives and was always contacted about whether this was okay or not. A lot of my Spuffy work you can also find at Spuffy archives, but that was self-selecting and I posted it myself.

I know I still have to get back to answering everyone from my last post two weeks ago (hopefully I'll have some time this weekend), but I did want to pop in and do a fun recap of my outtings the last two weeks in the city. I went to some pretty good (and crappy) restaurants and Fashion Week related events. I figure I'll keep this sort of diary for myself and if you all enjoy my exploits, then all the better!

September 7I've been on a kick watching movies on demand on Netflix and had the pleasure of watching 2008 Swedish film, Let the Right One In (trailer is linked). I had heard very good things about it and it lived up to all the critical praise it received. It's a beautifully atmospheric film that falls more into the thriller/noir genre than horror. It is surprisingly understated in many ways and really finds its strengths in the films silence. I love movies that can make use of that and still have great dramatic effect. It also is a very original take on the vampire tale in that it approaches it from a truly disheartening, realistic angle. The main characters are children, the vampire is (gasp!) actually female for a change, and the "love" story is one filled with an odd kind of innocence that you don't often find in vampire movies/books/tv shows because it eliminates what makes vampires appealing - their seductive nature. It has a bit of a slow start, but by the second half of the film through the end I was really charmed. It's creepy, beautiful, heartfelt, horrifying, mysterious, and hopeful all at once. Films are rarely able to accomplish all those things, let alone a genre film, so I wholeheartedly recommend it.

September 8 I met up with a friend of mine from college that I traveled to Paris and Barcelona with in April/May. She had also spent several weeks in Morocco with her boyfriend afferward before returning to the state this summer to spend some time and home in Rochester before heading off to Grenada to teach Spanish for 10 months. She leaves next week and made a pit stop in the city. We went to Cafeteria, which is a Chelsea American nouveau restaurant that we used to go to in college. It had been maybe 2 years since I'd been, and the food was terrible. I rarely get outright bad food in the city, but I literally couldn't eat the spicy chicken dish they put in front of me. I wasn't too pleased with the mac & cheese spring rolls, either. That was a culinary experiment that should have never been undertaken.

Um, hi guys. It's been about 10 months. Turns out I'm not dead, in case anyone was wondering. My last post was back in November after Seasonal Spuffy. I guess in some ways that was the straw that broke the camel's back. There was a lot of angst tied up with the twp ficathons I had signed up for, my participation in fandom had been waining for some months, and I just had to take a break. A full work schedule wasn't very conducive for my writing and I haven't written anything since then. Ever since I graduated from schoo two years ago, I've been very engaged with work and socializing.

My new fandom, if you want to call it that, is Lady Gaga. I regularly stop by GagaDaily, her main fan forum, to read news, watch concert clips, etc. I don't really participate though. I'm back to lurker status and have never felt the urge to forge friendships or conversation with other fans as my interest in her is very personal and I never feel the need to justify or debate what she does. She has also sparked an interest in me to go and see live music again, so there's been a lot of concert going th last few months.

There's also been travel, which will always be one of my greatest joys. In April and May I was in Paris, Barcelona and Mexico for a total of 3 weeks. This summer I also made it to Minneapolis to visit only_passenger and spent a week in Cape Cod. I'm trying to get my finances together to take a two week trip to Australia in November/December.

I've been very into True Blood and just finished watching Season 2 a week ago, which prompted me to think of Buffy and the LJ community. The last two days I've been rereading some of my fics and feeling a bit nostalgic. Sometimes I miss writing and I certainly miss interacting with you all. Setting the time aside to engage though is difficult and not anything I can commit to. Regardless, I did want to stop by say hello and find out how you all are doing.

I might have some words left in me yet. I just need to find where they've gone off to.

Since I didn't get a chance to do it last week, here's a reposting of my seasonal_spuffyficlet so I have it archived at my journal. For those that missed it (or any of the other entries), head on over!

Title: ConvergenceAuthor: ClawofCatTiming: S7Rating: PG-13Pairing: Spike/BuffyWords: 603Summary: Set during "Lessons," we learn more about Spike, the soul, and his perceptions about Buffy when sanity was slippery at best. A/N: Many thanks to only_passengerfor being my last minute sounding board on this fic.

Saturday afternoon I started to get a scratchy throat and a cough, which then morphed into an even worse cough and a low grade fever by Sunday, and then a 102 degree fever on Monday. This is the third time I've been quite sick in the last four months and each time it's gone straight to my lungs. Something is definately amiss. I spent all afternoon at my GP yesterday getting tested and taking a chest xray. And then all evening sweating and trying not to feel like I was going to spontaneously combust. I've had no appetite and have already lost 3 pounds. I feel a little better today - the fever seems to have broken - and am back to antibiotics. I have an appointment with a pulminologist tomorrow, so I hopefully he can get to the bottom of this.

I've been sleeping for the most part, but have some betaing I need to do, not to mention plenty of work cut out for me on my SS and IWRY stories. I have zero interest in working on them at the moment though. Mostly just want to lay in bed and feel pathetic.

This weekend buffyversetop5 hosted their Classic Recs session. I always love compiling esoteric lists and managed to post 7 of them for the round. Check them out - I've added them to my memories. I think my favorites were "5 Fics Featuring AtS Female Characters (Because They Rock)" and "5 Fics That Explore the Different Facets of Dawn."

Although I didn't do anything for Halloween, I did go to work in costume on Friday. I know a number of people on my flist are "Mad Men" fans and so are a bunch of my co-workers, so I got together this awesome vintage outfit very much in the spirit of the show and went in as a 50s office worker. Suit courtesy of my grandmother. Check out pics under the cut. It should be obvious by now that where there's an oppoortunity to dress up, I do.

My posting day for seasonal_spuffy was yesterday and although I didn't finish what I've been working on for the last two months, I did manage to post a S7 ficlet from crazy!Spike's POV that I'm pretty happy with. If you're interested, check out Convergence at the comm.

Last week the absence_oflight awards announced the winners of their latest round and I picked up a few surprise pretties for Severed and Sewn and Not Yours, which is an ooooold, dark, historical Angelus/William ficlet (my only m/m slash piece!). It's never received much attention, so I was kind of jazzed about that. I've always liked it. I love writing Angelus as a sadistic bastard. I really must write more evil characters. They have the best dialogue!

Many thanks to the judges, graphics staff, and mods for all their hard work. Many flist members also won, so I offer hearty congrats to them, as well. I'm off to work on my buffyversetop5 recs! Halloween picture posts to come tomorrow :D

I've been keeping quiet on LJ the last few weeks now that I've entered the hermit stage of writing my seasonal_spuffyfic. I bitched and whined pretty frequently last year about IWRY, so I've tried to keep that minimal on this go round. Needless to say, I think I'll be able to get it done, but as is my usual way, I'll be writing up until the 11th hour. I have about 5500 words so far and I'm guessing I'll need another 5500 or so. The thought exhausts me to no end.

This is easily my most ambitious idea to date, the longest fic I've written, and has gone through more changes than a handful of stories combined. I am not cut out to write plotty fics. I just hope that all this hard work will show and that the intent will match up with the execution. It all seems so incredibly hard. I haven't been writing regularly for nearly a year and yanking this baby from my guts is taking a lot out of me. I'll be so happy when it's over on Thursday. Because then I can immediately start on my IWRY fic! *falls over dead* Never again.

Apologies for the lack of LJ cut on the last post. My cuts and coding haven't been quite right since last September, and I have no idea why they sometimes act up. It only seems to get funky when I include LJ usernames, but not links. Any ideas what may be going on?

I've been pretty quiet the last two weeks, but I have been silently puttering around in my own way. I just overhauled my memories, so all of my fics and certain types of related fandom posts should be nicely categorized now. All of this was already on my sidebar, but I thought I'd cover myself twice over, especially my past recs from buffyversetop5. Classic recs week is October 29th - November 1st this year and I hope fandom comes out to participate. I've been working on a few lists and hope to have some really interesting ones up for your viewing pleasure.

Although it's outlined, I'm going to hold off finishing up and posting my menstruation in the Buffyverse meta until after seasonal_spuffy and iwry_marathon are done. I had a long discussion with eowyn_315 last night about what I'd like to accomplish with my SS entry and I think we got to a really good place with it. My posting date is in 2.5 weeks and, as usual, I'm quite behind since I only have time to do this on the weekends, but I'm hoping I knock out at least 2000 words today. I'm feeling pretty doubtful about being able to produce a contribution to shapinglight's Darla ficathon at the end of the month though. Between the other ficathon entries and recs, I just don't have time to dedicate it. I'll also be doing beta work for only_passenger around that time for her IWRY fic so, yes, stretched rather thin.

Speaking of betaing, I just worked with rebcake for the first time on her SS fic and it was a really positive experience. For those of you who haven't seen it and are in the mood for wedding fluff, go check out Under My Skin.

During the last few days, there have been posts on my flist regarding nominations at the sog_awardsand the nature of the categories that nominated fics have been grouped into. Questions about het/slash gen aren't new, not by a long shot, but I thought I'd explore the definitions a bit by using my work and the interesting way I've been nominated at the awards as an example of the fluidity.

First off, many thanks to whomever nominated Severed and Sewn for best slash, angst, and characterization. This particular story lists the primary pairing as Faith/Buffy. The action of the fic unfolds from Buffy's perspective and it's principally Faith that she directly interacts with. The content of the piece includes sex and shared emotional catharsis. I think most would agree that a fic like this belongs in the Slash category. I certainly do.

However, the story isn't really about Faith and Buffy. It's about Buffy mourning the passing of Angel of Spike. It's about her individual relationships with these two men, which are heavily explored. B/A and S/B are two distinct Het pairings. Where then do we draw the distinction in defining a story as het vs. slash? Most would say primary pairings are what categorically define fic in an award site context, but should author intent be taken into account? This sort of question puts a lot of responsibility on the weight of the nominator and, frankly, one that's pretty unecessary. I don't expect a reader to know or share my philosophical intentions when I post a story.

In addition to my slash nomination, I've also personally been nominated for Best Het author. Does this seem contrary? No, not at all. I've written femslash and I've written gen, but I primarily write about male/female relationships, and I think most people would consider me a Het author. I'd make this distinction whether I wrote one pairing or I wrote many (which I do).

Something that I was struck by was a comment made by angeariathat Het is somehow categorically defined as romantic or explores/develops a romantic relationship for the fic's primary pairing. If this is the case, then no one should consider me a Het writer. My work is not about romance or romantic relationships. I'm not interested in getting a pairing together. What I am interested in is exploring character's through their relationships with others. My work often includes intimacy, but not necessarily love. There's often a wealth of emotional energy being expressed, but not necessarily toward their partner. Defining het via romance is a narrow definition and one that, I think, principally serves longer, epic fics. Shorter fics and one shots don't always have the scope to make or break a relationship - to see the progression of a pairing getting together or breaking apart often requires more time and space that a longer story can spend chapters leading up to.

Over a year ago, I posed the question on my LJ What is Romance? and got some very interesting responses. Overall, I'd say romance is a genre where you can expect certain elements, including an exploration of the romantic entanglements of two (or more) characters, whether they're male/famale or male/male. Het and Slash I would broadly define as stories that explore the relationship of a primary pairing, romantic or otherwise. Gen, then, would be stories that focus on broader themes or character studies that don't include an intimate non-platonic relationship as its primary focus.

Gen fic and it's definitions was a major talking point at several of the panels at WriterCon this summer. enigmaticblueshandily wrote up some of her recollections about the Writing Gen Fic panel over at riters_r_us, and I encourage those of you that are interested to take a look. It was also a major part of the "Slash: Gay, Queer, Both, Neither?" panel I attended.

I think where you get into especially choppy waters is defining threesome/moresomes in an award site context. Assuming the threesome/moresome has mixed gender participants, the story's primary focus could be het, slash or both. At non-pairing specific sites, sometimes you'll get a Threesome category to address this circumstance, but at sites that don't what do you do?

I'm starting to increasingly wonder about this as my personal interest in multiple relationships in the Buffyverse evolves. We're generally forced to pick and choose which couple or relationship gets top billing in a fic, but what about fics where the primary focus is more than one relationship? Say you've got a fic with Buffy/Spike and Spike/Angel. Does Spike have to chose who he wants to "be with" at the end of the story for us to appropriately categorize it? What if it's unresolved, or he decides Buffy and Angel are better for each other, or he wants both of them, or he wants neither of them?